JooJoo is an African term for "magical" (I've always seen it spelled "juju," but never mind) and that's what Fusion Magic is desperately hoping to conjure up with the tablet, which conforms to most of the specs Arrington's been braying about for months with one key exception: Instead of costing less than $200, the JooJoo will clock in at $499.

Wired's Priya Ganapati did a hands-on with the JooJoo, and found it "elegant" and "simple," though also a bit slow and overpriced. Fusion Magic is planning to take orders later this week (assuming it gets any) and deliver the first JooJoos to customers in 8 to 10 weeks.

"Michael made many promises suggesting he will deliver on hardware, deliver on software, deliver on funding -- none of which came true. We had to move on," Rathakrishnan said in a webcast Monday.

The downside for Fusion Magic? Instead of having a very loud bullhorn promoting the CrunchPad (and 600,000 slavish readers lapping up news about it every day), it has the opposite: a sworn enemy who does not hesitate to take editorial revenge for even small slights.

When you're a company nobody's heard of, trying to introduce a new device for a market that doesn't yet exist, with feverish rumors of somebody like Apple stepping in and crushing you -- and you're charging way too much money -- the odds of your survival are slight.

Note: In past blog posts I've referred to Mr. Arrington as "Captain Crunch." Cringester S.C. points out that this nickname rightly belongs to John Draper, the original phone phreak, who used a toy whistle from a Cap'n Crunch cereal box to hack Ma Bell. So from here on out, no more confusing the hacking legend with the man who's a legend in his own mind.

This story, "JooJoo: The CrunchPad Gets Reincarnated" was originally published by
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